Why
California. Why now. How does it compromise.

                                  These are involuntary
noises.
                        They have got great
                        heft to them.

Sunday like February
                                                          shorter:

remembering the insufficiency of fish on Fridays,
the hunger for something, some
envoy, to say

                                    come home, I love you,
                                    I’m tired of smoking alone

I am writing a vacation guide to Purgatory.
It is composed in shoals & obelisks;

seventy-seven pages of lissome histrionics,
of a birthing position, some anarchic Aphrodite

                                    (I was a curious child),

hell-bent on the mirific vision of dream canyons,
            a scimitar on the hip of the night watch.

                                   ***

This is a drama in at least three acts
that unfolds within the space of a single room.

Several rooms, actually, but only one
at a time,
                        & always the voice pernoctating

                        the dark downstairs,

            some name straining

to speak one name:
                                                  monster.

            Or misreading another line:

            My opium makes all light more radiant.

The font of them, those grandfather nights toward
the junkyards, the eirons, the lonesome farms.

So good-bye, Dolores Park, I hardly knew you.

            The noir of your

                        contours was never enough.


Counting down old cornrows, christening them
individual mermaids, tailed and named—

Samovar, Minotaur, Dime-store, Petit-four.

                                   The coupling in the corner
                                   room, the want of it.

An eyelash valentine off the wharf’s border,
a hand in yours.